Julia Hartsell

Julia is a dancer, writer and ritualist who has been catalyzing community around healing and movement for two decades. With a background in performance art and world religions, Julia has spent her life immersed in embodied practices, tending the intersections of the seen and unseen. Trusting the body’s inherent wisdom, she utilizes these diverse practices to help access the body’s intuition for emotional expression, healing and transformation. With an animist worldview, her work is focused on reclaiming relational ways of living and ancient forms of medicine in service of personal, ancestral and cultural healing. Julia is Co-founder, Director and Liturgist at Heartward Sanctuary where she anchors a weekly Ecstatic Dance Church and partners with the land to in returning their community's beloveds to the earth by natural burial. 

For ten years, she mothered The Flowjo (a circus & dance studio in Carrboro) and the communities that gathered there in Carrboro, NC before COVID closed its doors in 2021. Passionate about movement as a healing practice, she has developed Community Grief Ceremonies, Ritual Dances and Ancestral Dance practices for reconnection with elemental forces and ancestral allies. Julia is a certified Ancestral Lineage Healing Practitioner trained by Ancestral Medicine. She has trained as a Death Doula & Home Funeral Guide with the Center for End of Life Transitions. She has also trained in Psychopomp and Soul Retrieval Work with Red Earth Healing.